Bob Crow, general secretary of railworkers union RMT

It's a scandal that the government are colluding with the European Union in a policy of industrial vandalism that would wipe out train building in the nation that gave the railways to the world. We will fight this stitch-up tooth and nail from the shop floor to the benches of the House of Commons.

German rail giant Deutsche Bahn awarded a £5bn fleet contract to German company Siemens and no one batted an eyelid but when it comes to British skilled manufacturing jobs getting support from this government all we get is a pack of excuses and they stand exposed as totally impotent in light of the Bombardier\Thameslink scandal.

Gerry Doherty, leader of the TSSA rail union

Ministers must abandon their role as Pontius Pilate and stop standing idly by while train making slowly bleeds to death in the UK.

They owe it to British manufacturing in general, and the people of Derby in particular, to reverse their decision to award this huge contract to Siemens of Germany.

No German or French government would be so foolish as to award such a vital contract to an overseas manufacturer, threatening thousands of domestic jobs. We should be equally hard headed when it comes to preserving our own train building industry.

Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite

The situation at Bombardier has reached crisis point. The government must now act swiftly and decisively to save Britain's last train manufacturer.

The dire consequences of the government's misguided decision to exclude Bombardier from the contract to build carriages for the Thameslink project is now becoming a reality.

Unite will be working tirelessly to maximise voluntary redundancies and natural wastage and we expect the company to fully cooperate with us but, the solution lies with the government. It's a tragedy because these redundancies would have been needless if the government really cared about British manufacturing and British skills.

Just three months ago, the chancellor, George Osborne proclaimed that the Tory-led government wanted the words "made in Britain and created in Britain" to drive our country forward. Today, these hollow words will stick in the teeth of the loyal and hardworking men and women at Bombardier.

Transport secretary Philip Hammond

The only options available to us were to go ahead and award the contract to the bidder who made the highest value-for-money bid on the basis of the criteria Labour set out when they launched this procurement in 2008, or to cancel the project altogether. We can't cancel the Thameslink project, we have already invested billions of pounds in the platforms, the track improvements and the other major infrastructure changes. It is the correct decision within the terms that were set out when the procurement was launched. I think the question is whether the procurement was correctly framed.

The way some of our continental partners approach these things is to look more strategically at the support of the domestic supply chain and it is clear because the French routinely award contracts for trains to French builders and the Germans award contracts for trains to German builders. It is clear that it is possible to structure the contracts such that, even within the constraints of the European procurement directive, there are much greater chances of the domestic supply chain succeeding.

I think we have got to look at how we manage these things for the UK in the future.

Vince Cable and I have written to the Prime Minister suggesting that we use the next stage of the growth review to do just that.

I'm the first person to say that free trade and open markets are good for Britain but I also think that level playing fields are good for Britain and we do need to ask ourselves the question whether we are playing by the same rules as everybody else.